In a previous article, Escaping the Curse of the Optional in the Ed-Tech Market, I shone a small spotlight on a chart that differentiated the nominal uses of augmented reality from more transcendent and appealing uses of augmented reality (shown below).
The hierarchy imagined in this chart may prove difficult for some to visualize, so I wanted to provide a clear example of augmented reality as a visualization tool. Enter Moment AR, by ColorBlack, an augmented reality app available for both iOS and Android that is paired with an AR device called the Merge Cube. This app is designed to help children with autism, mental health, language, and/or social-emotional behavior challenges, enabling them to practice, demonstrate and improve their social/emotional skills. Here’s what it looks like, in your hands:
The app offers three modules of therapy: Emotions, Language, and Social. Within the emotions module, for example, co-founder Natasha Chaja explains
3D images of the app’s characters are initiated. Six characters and related color scheme depicting the feelings/emotions of happy (yellow), sad (blue), angry (red), bored (grey), fear (purple), and disgusted (green) are viewable on each side of the cube. The characters are gender neutral and humanoid in nature, with no sound or vocalizations to allow for language and culture-free utility. The user can maneuver the cube to view a preferred image. It is also expandable by tapping the character on the screen, producing the same character on all six sides of the cube.
She continues
The same character is then involved in six different scenarios that represent their emotion. For example, when viewing Anger alone, the character is the color red, with a scowl on its face, shaking its fists, and stomping its feet. When expanded to all six sides of the cube, Anger is involved in scenarios such as grabbing a toy from another person, slamming the door on a person, throwing a toy, and losing a competition.
This app is designed to allow either facilitator to engage a child in discussion or expression of others’ or his/her own emotions and resultant social behavior, individually or in small groups. It can be used as a counseling tool, a screener, or a partial assessment. Each module enables the facilitator, often a school psychologist, to “begin dialogue with the student or students, identify the emotion, and engage in conversation about experiences in which the child has elicited such emotion, as well as modeling more ‘appropriate’ peer interactions.”
Color Black
According to Kevin Chaja, the other co-founder of Color Black, the Moment AR app is evidence-, research-, and curriculum-based. And it appears to be gathering steam for a commercial life well beyond its original intentions: “We primarily made it for [mental health] professionals” explains Kevin Chaja, “but I have seen people from every area use it. Marriage counselors, police officers, life coaches–it’s truly amazing where it has branched off to.”
Designed to increase emotional responsiveness in children, this app uses the images and presentation of augmented reality quite well. Based on our chart of purposes, the scenarios made available through this app and the Merge Cube begin with three of the nominal, yet vital uses of AR:
- establishing a setting
- establishing moods
- reinforcing a storyline
This app demonstrates the tremendous visualization advantages of augmented reality, even at a nominal level. Can you then imagine to what heights these advantages would grow to if Color Black moved upwards on the scale, toward transformative uses? I know that Chaja is currently working on enhancements to this very end. I can’t wait to see them. – Len Scrogan
